CNL Lunch Talks

Alexandra Perovic

Binding in Down Syndrome:

Evidence from English and Serbo-Croatian

Thursday February 5th, 2004, 12:30 PM, 3416 Marie Mount Hall

Down syndrome (DS) is a genetic disorder typically accompanied by moderate to severe learning disability. Language in this population is traditionally described as delayed, mirroring the pattern in typical language development, with no obvious signs of deficiency. In this study we report findings from an experimental investigation of the knowledge of binding, the module of grammar regulating the distribution of reflexives and pronouns, in two groups of young adults with DS, speakers of English and Serbo-Croatian.

Individuals with DS, both English and Serbo-Croatian speaking, were found to have difficulties comprehending reflexives, but not pronouns. Since for the interpretation of reflexives the syntactic relation between the reflexive element and its antecedent is crucial, in contrast to pronouns that are interpreted by invoking extrasyntactic mechanisms, the pattern suggests a deficit in DS that is syntactic in nature. Such a pattern is exactly the opposite to that found in typically developing English children who obey the syntactic constraints on the distribution of reflexives early on, but have trouble applying coreference rule, a constraint outside syntax proper that regulates the interpretation of pronouns.

The findings are significant in two ways: first, they provide crucial evidence that language in DS is not merely delayed but also deficient in important respects, with the deficit pertaining to an inability to establish the syntactic relation between the anaphor and its antecedent. Second, the findings further our knowledge of binding in non-impaired grammar, favouring one of the competing theories of binding phenomena: one that invokes both syntactic and extrasyntactic factors in the process of determining reference of a pronominal element (Reinhart & Reuland, 1993; Grodzinsky & Reinhart, 1993) as opposed to a theory that relies solely on syntactic constraints in the same process (standard Binding Theory of Chomsky, 1981; 1986).